I am so frustrated, if there is anyone in Los Angeles I will drive to you and meet you at a Starbuck's ( and spring for a latte or lunch somewhere) if you can get my Windows 8 running with XAMPP and my LocalHost and security issues going properly.

I've got Windows 8 PRO on my laptop. Just installed latest XAMPP & with latest control panel.I launched control panel and started Apache & mySQL.I edited my HOSTS file and now I have these lines:

If I try to go to http://localhost/xampp/index.php OR http://localhost/xampp/xampp.php OR even http://localhost/xampp/ it cannot find any of those. Any help would be appreciated--------------------------

But I did notice that in the directory xampp\htdocs there is a file index.php, when I try to open that file in a browser I get a message saying something is wrong with my XAMPP installtion. The text of the file is:

Important note about User Account Control in Windows 8. THERE IS AN IMPORTANT CHANGE IN UAC FOR WINDOWS 8!

In Windows 8, you can make UAC quiescent, but you cannot turn it off from the UAC user control window. Apache will not install properly with UAC quiescent. In order to turn off UAC, I had to download a little ap called TweakUAC. It is free and it does the job. When I tried to turn on UAC after installation of Apache, neither product liked it. Even quiescent, UAC kills Apache and when UAC is not on, you can't get any of the new, splashy features that they advertise as "the big deal" with windows 8.

So, for windows 8 installation, you need to know how to turn of UAC from the inside or get TweakUAC until that command gets bundled into the Apache installation distribution or UAC and Apache learn how to play in the sandbox together. As of now, Microsoft's attitude is "old west" -- the only good Indian is a dead Indian.

"Art is the indispensible medium for the communication of a moral ideal."--Ayn Rand

I successfully loaded the latest XAMPP stack to my Windows 8.1 machine after receiving the same warnings shown below.The UAC warning appears to have been related to Windows "assuming" the install was going to happen in the Windows software directory and not the usual c:\xampp directory.

I ignored the warning and made sure to install in the default C:\XAMPP directory. The installation was successful, however upon starting the XAMPP control panel I received warnings about the Apache and MySQL ports being blocked.

The PC is running McAfee security, so I went toMcAfee -> Firewall -> Ports & System Services, and placed a checkmark for HTTPS port 443 and HTTP port 80 to open them.

Restarted XAMPP control panel and everything works fine. No UAC issues...